Org mode's HTML export lets you use #+BEGIN_... and #+END_...
blocks for custom <div> classes, but what about custom <span>
classes? There are some ways to do it, but they all move the text out
of the normal document flow, which makes reading the source difficult.
Instead, you can use org-add-link-type, usually a way to register
custom link schemes. Org links are inline and quite readable, and
there is a notion of a link that isn't clickable, so it's not too
much semantic abuse.

(defunjw/html-escape-attribute(value)"Entity-escape VALUE and wrap it in quotes.";; http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-html5-20090212/serializing-html-fragments.html;;;; "Escaping a string... consists of replacing any occurrences of;; the "&" character by the string "&amp;", any occurrences of the;; U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE character by the string "&nbsp;", and, if;; the algorithm was invoked in the attribute mode, any occurrences;; of the """ character by the string "&quot;"..."(let* ((value(replace-regexp-in-string"&""&amp;"value))(value(replace-regexp-in-string"\u00a0""&nbsp;"value))(value(replace-regexp-in-string"\"""&quot;"value)))value))(eval-after-load"org"'(org-add-link-type"span"#'ignore; not an 'openable' link#'(lambda (classdescformat)(pcaseformat(`html(format"<span class=\"%s\">%s</span>"(jw/html-escape-attributeclass)(or desc"")))(_(or desc""))))))

God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He
existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter.
Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into
nothingness, he shattered Himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound
fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms
that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years. In
Mainländer’s philosophy, “God knew that he could change from a state
of super-reality into non-being only through the development of a
real world of multiformity.” Employing this strategy, He excluded
Himself from being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death
was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been
initiated, the momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would
continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence

(And also, one of the few uses of first contact as a believable
catalyst for introspection.)

“They’re not algae like the stuff you get on a pond back home.
They’re protozoa, as far as I can tell from the samples we did get,
single-celled organisms. But they’re more than that, they’re
self-assembling into something bigger. Into a higher species. Like,
you know, how an ant colony or a swarm of bees does. We need to get
a linguist in, that’s the protocol. Nothing about them without them,
isn’t that how you put it?”

Min clicked her tongue, frowned at her across the desk. “Bees are
pretty amazing things,” she admitted. “But, you know, they don’t
actually talk to people.”

“It wasn’t actually bees, that was a goddamn analogy.” Gita crossed
her arms, faced Min down. “We’re doing this properly, or not at
all.”

Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or
at the the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible
infrastructure of labour — primarily caregiving, in its various
aspects — that is mostly performed by women... The cultural primacy
of making, especially in tech culture — that it is intrinsically
superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially
caregiving — is informed by the gendered history of who made things,
and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world,
not merely for hearth and home.

...

Describing oneself as a maker — regardless of what one actually or
mostly does — is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered,
capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.

My earliest memory is of white men in white coats holding
clipboards, examining me. They measured my skull and prodded me with
thick pink fingers and made careful notes. There was a war coming,
they kept saying, and we had to be prepared.

Because of aliens.

&num; [...]

Humans are the best possible life form and white humans are the best
possible humans and, also, we have a manifest destiny and the
universe is our heritage.

(Follow-up question: If the software that itself provides the
foundational infrastructure for a huge percentage of the web (and a
significant percentage of the rest of the Internet) decides it is no
longer possible to manage its own infrastructure, how fucked are the
rest of us? You can whine about net neutrality all you want, but
here's the real threat to open and accessible communication.)

In OS X 10.9 and earlier, you could get the device from the queue
sender in the callback:

/* Registered with IOHIDDeviceRegisterInputValueCallback */staticvoidinput(void*ctx,IOReturninResult,void*inSender,IOHIDValueRefvalue){IOHIDDeviceRefdevice=IOHIDQueueGetDevice(inSender);/* Do something with the device and value... */}

This no longer works; IOHIDQueueGetDevice returns NULL. Instead,
you need to pull the device from the value, via its element:

staticvoidinput(void*ctx,IOReturninResult,void*inSender,IOHIDValueRefvalue){IOHIDElementRefelt=value?IOHIDValueGetElement(value):NULL;IOHIDDeviceRefdevice=elt?IOHIDElementGetDevice(elt):NULL;/* Do something with the device and value... */}

(I don't know if the NULL checks are needed, but since both getters
have warnings about undefined behavior when passed invalid
values/elements, it can't hurt.)

I also disabled Sparkle-based updating because Apple fucked up their
code signing format. Yes, again. That's enough times that there's
no legitimate claim to security left in it and it only continues to
exist as a commercial bludgeon.

Jess and I went to Internationale Spieltage SPIEL this year. It
was the first time for both of us and so a bit overwhelming — I
went to GenCon a few times in the Milwaukee MEC, which was my idea
of a large commercially-focused convention and this was considerably
larger and more commercial than that.

If you're going mostly to try and buy new and hard-to-find games it
seems like you really want to be there the first day and the last day.
The first day because limited items will sell out quickly. We didn't
get to the Japon Brand booth until the second day, and already
many games (Onitama, Villannex, The Ravens of Thri Sahashri)
were sold out. Some were even sold out
before the convention, via preorder. Most of these won't be
offered for sale anywhere else (except probably-gouging resellers).
Similarly I got Onirim at the Z-Man booth Saturday morning,
and while they had plenty of copies left, the promotional expansions
were all gone.

Conversely, the last day is when most of the non-publisher booths will
be running sales on popular or overstocked games.

Both the first and last days are also the least crowded.

Overall I think boardgames are doing a better job than videogames of
diversifying themes. Yes, it's a lot of spaceships and axes but:
Furry bouncers? Mushroom hunting? There's more interesting
stuff than one group can play coming out of the middle-sized and
larger publishers. But there's also still a disturbingly large segment
of boardgames that reproduce troubling history. I mean that in two
ways:

First, there's a lot of games that encourage awful historiography. One
major offender this year was Historia, a game about
technological progress from "the start of civilization" to the
Singularity (which is the "end" of the technology track, and of course
happens shortly after our current age). Another was
Progress: Evolution of Technology, a title to make even Auguste
Comte blush. These games are frustrating because there are so many
of them and so few of them really introduce new designs rather than
just new arrangements or themes. But they're also frustrating because
this is the best medium we have for exploring structural "what if?"s
in a formal way, and so much of it is given over to bowdlerized
retreads of what we already know happened.

But second, there's still a lot of boardgames that are just flat-out
sexist and racist. Many of them are the same ones: "Civilization"
games always follow a European-inspired trajectory and viewpoint, even
if you're playing as "the Egyptians." Centuries of chattel slavery,
colonialism, and white Christian imperialism are condensed to simple
placement mechanics like "workers," "exploration," "settlement," etc.

There's more to history than Amero-European influence's waxing and
waning; why not use other viewpoints? (One of the most interesting
games I saw was Mahardika, a cooperative game in which you play
as Sukarno, Hatta, and other founders of Indonesia fighting for
independence.) There's more to say about that waxing and waning; why
not games that interrogate rather than simply use that history? And (I
hope) there's more to Amero-European culture than slavery and
imperialism and trade policy; where are the games about that?

Even outside those designs, the games that aren't about historical
topics still cover or feature mostly-white, mostly-dude subjects. This
problem runs across the whole spectrum of game themes and sizes, from
Pathfinder's only black characters being an extra-cost expansion
to the 34 to 6 to 2 male to female to unspecified/ambiguous gender
ratio in Boss Monster.

From an outsider's perspective, the boardgame industry feels like
it's trying to compress the last decade of bad business development in
the video game industry into a short period for itself. Many games
have expansions (DLC), some of which were obviously planned from the
start, sometimes even feeling like they're just half the "real" game
cut off and sold separately. Every game has preorder bonuses, and like
videogames they're often retailer- or venue-specific.

Like videogames, the production costs on the high end are growing
fast. Larger boxes, lots of parts. Like videogames, this isn't
accompanied by higher measures of manufacturing quality — games
aren't getting stronger cards, more accurate cuts and prints, or wood
and metal instead of cardboard and plastic. They're just getting more
parts and bigger boxes.

These additional pieces are not always justified by the designs: Piles
of tokens where a single die counter would suffice, or wooden or
die-cut pieces that could just be a card or sometimes even just an
agreed-upon area of the table. "Check out our unique meeple" plays
into growing boardgamer-as-consumerist-identity memes; like
videogames, this attitude is in turn necessary to prop up the
high-cost market, which in turn raises the stakes and demands and
produces even higher costs, etc. The median price of a new boardgame
is trending to $60 and the high-end $100+.

Unlike videogames, boardgames don't have the same properties to let
the bottom fall out of the "low end" in the same way. The fixed costs
of manufacturing means I don't expect to see piles of new $1 or $2
games any time soon. But that doesn't mean there aren't repercussions
for smaller designers, who seem to be mostly moving to print-and-play
(which just distributes the manufacturing cost inefficiently over the
player base), digital boardgames, and Kickstarter.

And wow. Kickstarter (and generic "crowdfunding") was everywhere. I
thought "Kickstart this thing we're going to make and take real
investment for later anyway" was bad in videogames, but in boardgames
even the large companies like Filosofia/Z-Man and Funforge are doing
Kickstarters basically as high-profile preorders. There were multiple
booths selling "we'll run your crowdfunding" services. This should
serve as a warning next time someone offers to erode labor and
consumer protection with vague promises of "increasing competition" or
"removing the middleman," but it probably won't.

[bell] hooks defended the critical attention [directed at Beyoncé].
We focus on Beyoncé because Beyoncé's the one who put the word
feminist up at the VMAs, hooks explained, and because what a
"liberatory sexuality" looks like is a "crisis in feminist
thinking." "I wish she were here," hooks said. "She and I need to
talk."

hooks and Beyoncé need to talk about "Partition," specifically. The
song's lyrics exemplify hooks’s somewhat conservative fear that
feminist women might be sexually liberating themselves "against
their own interests." "If I'm a woman and I'm sucking somebody’s
dick in a car and they're coming in my mouth and we could be in one
of those milk commercials or whatever, is that liberatory?" hooks
asked. "Or is it part of the tropes of the existing, imperialist,
white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist structure of female
sexuality?"

bell hooks: One thing that's really clear to us is things are
not either/or. Orange is the New Black is not all bad or all good,
and neither is media. More often than not, images in media are
mixed. And it's hard for us then because what's the language to talk
about them? What's the language to talk about her progressive image
and her character of Sophia and all those other tired-ass black
women that are just reproducing so many stereotypes in the things
that they say and do?"

Obviously, there's a gulf between Beyoncé and Bayonetta. One is a real
woman trying to navigate multiple hostile systems, at the same time
having an immense amount of capital (social, cultural, and financial),
yet most of that capital is contingent on her performing in certain
ways; she is simultaneously a person and a product. The other is a
videogame character made by a mostly(-but-not-exclusively) male team;
she is entirely a product, but one we are asked to project our own
agency and subjectivity into.1

But I think the hole in our language that hooks identifies, that we
need to speak about the former, is the same language we lack to speak
about the latter. And I think it's for a similar reason: both concern
the role and manifestation and effect of "liberatory sexuality." Any
such discussion must be a long conversation among informed
participants considering a broader context. These are all things
mainstream games writing is terrible at — it is
broadcast-focused, short-lived, and isolationist.

Moreover, the current cultural environment
is explicit designed to shut down this conversation in favor of an
unquestionable "everything's fine" answer, not for any informed
reason, but because they're afraid of not being able to trade $60 for
a glance at pixelated tit.

Or are we? That's part of the question at hand. Jess
told me she'd like to read some contrast of Lollipop Chainsaw and
Bayonetta and I think identification is a big part of it: In
Lollipop Chainsaw I think you're asked to identify with Nick as much
as Juliet. ↩